Violent Geographies of Childhood and Home: The Child in the Closet

Abstract

Building on recent critiques of the marginalization of violence and terror ``closer to home'' in geographical and sociological scholarship, this chapter argues for more thorough engagements with the emotional geographies and generational politics of children's exposure to and negotiation of violence in the home. It does so first, and foremost, because interpersonal violence at home affects the lives of a significant number of children, often well into adulthood. Second, the chapter demonstrates that domestic abuse of children poses a major challenge to conceptualizations of home and of the subjectivities of adults and children in western contexts whose constructions of childhood and home have been so central to the grafting of universalized understandings of children's rights. The chapter first considers the arguments for a critical geography of home, questioning the absence of substantive engagements with the issue of child abuse. It then presents a summary of research findings from epidemiology and psychology, to give an insight into these discipline's perspectives and research findings on the scale, intersecting types and impacts of child abuse on children and adult survivors' health and well-being. After consideration of the conceptual approaches that underpin this work and of alternative sociological and geographical theorization emphasizing relationality, embodied emotional geographies, and intersecting spatialities, the chapter concludes with a review of work within and outside of geography that begins to demonstrate the need for a greater focus on geographical aspects of violence against children at home. In doing so, the chapter aims to move the diverse experiences, practices, emotions, and senses of self of children and adult survivors who are living with (the consequences of) abuse more squarely into the heart of debates on the home, the family, and the private and to consider how geography might contribute to the efforts of other disciplines to contest violence against children and to respond sensitively to different needs of survivors.